Feature in FotoNostrum, a Spanish art magazine

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There are certain moments when we are caught off-guard, looking at ourselves from another time, another place. Finding myself in FotoNostrum, a Spanish fine-art magazine feature, with a retrospective of Steve McCurry’s work is one of those.

It’s a perfect juxtaposition of the times. McCurry’s work, which remains powerful and iconic to this day, is no longer the paragon of photographic virtue. Instead, magazines like National Geographic (whose cover was graced by McCurry’s work) and the journalism industry have come to recognize the inherent colonialism in having a white photographer be the primary visual painter of India and the Middle East for America. As an industry, and as a society, we are reckoning with the notion of who tells the stories of the marginalized, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests against the brutal murder of George Floyd.

And yet I find it strange to be in the same magazine as a photographic giant like McCurry. Part of this is probably the feeling of someone who’s been taught to keep their head down and follow mainstream culture rather than rise above with one’s own vision. It’s the impostor syndrome, the self shrinking at the magnitude of inhabiting an influential role. I am sure legendary Black photographer Gordon Parks felt this on the daily when he was working at Life Magazine in the 1960s. I certainly don’t feel like a trailblazer.

But I suppose that also brings me to other feelings, which is to wonder why, in the light of 2020, we are featuring Steve McCurry on the cover of a cutting-edge art magazine! The current mood across the world is one of upheaval, one of social change as marginalized peoples in every country are rising up to demand their place at the table. Is it tokenizing to have my work featured here, as if to check the boxes of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Asian-Pacific Islander’?

Personally I don’t believe the choice to have the portrait Sharbat Gula, the famous ‘Afghan Girl’, on the cover, was one done with a particular agenda in mind. But it does speak to the notion that decisions like this are accompanied by unconscious assumptions. I for one am in a place where I am reckoning with my own hidden biases– I hope that many across journalism and art are doing the same, and embedding revised practices into their organizations.

In any case, I thought FotoNostrum put together the feature well, editing my words to achieve something applicable to a wide photographic audience. I’m not even sure that I said it in a single sentence, “Words reach peoples’ minds– photographs reach people’s hearts,” but I am keeping that quote now. Regardless of the era, the power of photography remains the same– to move people.